by Ian Donnis and Scott MacKay

State Treasurer Gina Raimondo’s pension briefing to the state Senate was nearing its conclusion this afternoon when she dropped a mini-bombshell in response to a lawmaker’s question: she hopes to fix the state’s pension crisis without cutting the earned benefits of public employees:

I would love to be able to craft a proposal that solves this problem and we can say to state employees, “If you’ve earned it, it’s yours,” and I think that is possible, and that’s why we’re taking so long to carefully go through the numbers.